About

Gaming in the Obscure

£9,357

pledged of £4,000 goal

297

backers

We did it!

Stretch Goals

£7,500 Gaming in the Obscure Bookmarks [REACHED]

£12,000 A2 Poster

£14,500 Gaming in the Obscure Mug

I started collecting retro gaming consoles when I first discovered the PC Engine. It was a machine that had largely been overlooked in the UK and I was instantly smitten. But whilst looking for more information I uncovered a whole bunch of consoles that NEC had created and i'd never heard of.

Diving even deeper and I discovered consoles from other manufacturers, some from manufacturers that I hadn't even known had ever released a games console.

Introduction to the Second Generation

This started an obsession and over the years i've put together a pretty good collection of obscure machines. Pretty much everyone I know has grown bored of hearing about them so i've decided to write a book to inflict my condition on as many people as possible.

This is where you come in, i've written the book, it's been edited and I have a designer making it look pretty. We've taken photos of the consoles and some of the games that we enjoy playing (enjoy is a little strong for some of the them). We just need to get this printed and into the hands of as many people as we can.

What's included in the book?

It has 18 consoles in total, it doesn't include every vintage machine ever made. For instance, I made the decision to only include consoles I owned, this was so I could (where possible) record footage of games and take my own photos. I felt this was important rather than just buying stock images.

I also haven't included a lot of variations of machines, at least not ones that don't bring something new. I haven't included the Sharp Famicom TV, it's just a Famicom mated with a TV. For the same reason I haven't included every variation of the PC Engine, there are a LOT (I could write a book just on the PC Engine) but most of them are just simple design changes, including one mated with a television. I've included two that I think are unique enough.

I don't include computers, which I classify as being a machine where keyboard input is considered the default method. There is one exception in the book, but it's for very good reasons.

Book Stats

The book is A4 landscape and has 160 full colour pages (at the moment, it's already increased once) featuring generation breakdowns, information about each console, 3 full page colour pictures of each console and 4 full page colour pictures of selected games. The Kickstarter books will be numbered and have a slightly different cover to any copies sold outside of Kickstarter.

The final couple of pages will be the list of super backers, comprising the names of middle and top tier backers.

The game images have (mostly) been taken from the actual hardware using a capture device. I made the decision not to use any kind of post-processing on the images. So they are exactly as captured from the original hardware. The exceptions to this are the Nintendo Virtual Boy, MB/GEC Vectrex and Bandai Wonderswan. Unfortunately, I could not find a good way to capture decent images from these machines. Therefore the images in the book are from emulation. Although I did verify that the screens looked as close as possible to the original hardware.

T-Shirts

Top tier backers will also receive one t-shirt they can select from these options:

Risks and challenges

The biggest risk is actually getting enough money to print enough copies of the book to satisfy the number of backers. We've calculated what we need, taken into account postage fees and the numbers look good. We've added a percentage on top (to cope with unpaid pledges, Kickstarters fees, fluctuating currency prices etc) to get our project goal.